Teaching Social Media Marketing: Content and Analytics

Social Media Marketing: Content and Analytics welcomed its first group of students. I designed and delivered the course to both online and on-campus students. It was a great experience! I utilized HubSpot Academy, Marketo, Hootsuite Academy, and resources from other major marketing companies for my course materials. I used my own book: Social Media Marketing: Strategies in Utilizing Consumer-Generated Content as well as HubSpot’s Inbound Methodology book.

Challenges with working on Content Marketing for a Small Business

We had a semester long project where students worked on a small businesses’ content marketing plan. During the semester, students created infographics, press releases, videos, curated tweets and blogs for this small business. We used a variety of social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. The owner of the small business is most active on Facebook and thus, we had to publish content that was on Facebook to other social media networks to increase their online presence.

One of the challenges we had was the hosting of the content such as blogs on the company’s website. Since it is a small business, their knowledge on digital marketing was limited. Time was also limited for them as well. Thus, although there were many contents that were created by the students, these contents were not shared on the respective social media sites because it wasn’t hosted on their website. We didn’t have access to their website as an admin either which made content delivery more challenging.

Students’ Video Production and A Behind the Scene Video

Nonetheless, in this blog, I would like to share one of the videos that my students were working on for the small business. It took them a while to get the video shot, edited and published.

Watching the students get into the project was great. Everyone played a role in the video production. I, as the professor, in turn, took a “behind the scenes” video to capture their experiential learning moments.

That’s a Wrap!

What I learned about teaching social media marketing is that the contents that were being produced need to be for a real company. I personally feel that when the students have a “hands-on” experience, they will feel more excited about the course. I really enjoyed teaching this class. I think it is also the fact that the students were engaged and that motivated me to think about course content that will get them excited.